Stone Cold
by the lights above
Summary: His love is long lost and it has hit him today, hard, a punch that he can never quite recover from. /  BellatrixRodolphus / Written for the Last Kiss Challenge / Subtle T themes


_**Disclaimer:** I own nothing except Basil Avery and a strong compassion for Mister Lestrange._

_Written for the Last Kiss challenge on HPFC. A Bellatrix/Rodolphus fic. Contains mentions of infidelity, character-death and some non-explicit sexual content._

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><p>Her face is cold the first time she looks at him.<p>

It's the morning of their last OWL exam, and he's anxiously swapping practice questions with Basil Avery, when she slides past behind his back.

He feels the air around her, the aroma of intoxicating flowers that surround her, the sweeping motions of her wild, attractive hair against her robes. He swivels his head and catches a glimpse of dark curls and a tall head drawn back gracefully. She sits down besides the blonde girl and the brunette he thinks must be a twin of hers, and glances at him in her quest for marmalade to accompany her toast. Her eyes are dark, like her hair, and wide, and he smiles at her unconsciously but she only looks upon him with cold indifference before jerking her head back.

He gets the feeling he doesn't make much of an impression on her.

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><p>Her hands are cold the first time he touches them.<p>

He had been watching her the whole hour in the drawing room of the Black House, smiling at her when he was sure her father was busy in discussion with the mother, but she had simply stared back as if seeing right through him. He is anxious to feel her now, having already known that the marriage would be secured and a ceremony would take place in nothing short of a month, anxious to run a hand down her slim white arm and press a kiss to her red lips.

She follows him down the hall when her mother suggests she see him to the door and Rodolphus hears the younger blonde sister giggle behind him and offers him her arm with an encouraging smile. She takes it, lowering her eyes to his arm as if assessing its danger, not returning the smile.

He stops at the door, and straightens his robes and wishes to kiss her cheek but dares not. Instead, he reaches out and strokes the hand she had dropped from his arm delicately with his fingers. Her fingers feel light and slim and so, so cold but he smiles in appreciation of touching her nevertheless and bades her sweet goodbye.

She doesn't reply and locks the door behind him.

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><p>Her lips are cold the first time he kisses her.<p>

He is all smiles through the ceremony, eyes constantly moving towards the young girl next to him in an ivory bridal dress. She barely glances at him, never smiles and her voice is empty and cold when she repeats her vows.

He says his with meaning and love applied in countless coats, and looks beyond her indifference with blind love.

When the minister requests their binding in a kiss, he leans forward eagerly and she turns her head slowly, standing so still, her lips parted, so cold as he presses all his love into them. She doesn't kiss him back.

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><p>Her bed is cold the first time he takes her.<p>

It's her bed, her room, her little furniture they are in the midst of on their wedding night. If it was his choice, he'd have her taken to the Lestrange house, shown her all the comforts available there, taken her for a swim in the waters in the back of the house, taken her in his room on the bed of Egyptian cotton and Chinese silk sheets.

Instead, he is led to her room, a simple room with no personality in it, just as cold as she herself is, just as empty as she seems to him, and he has half a mind to delay the act so as to do it in style.

But he is anxious, and young, and aroused by her blood-red lips and high-boned white face and dark curls that slap his hand when he holds her to him and he takes her with love and promise.

She barely reacts to him, and her hands are permanently glued to his shoulders and her face is cold when he whispers his love to her in his bliss afterwards.

Rodolphus never receives a reciprocation of his love.

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><p>Her heart is cold the last time he takes her.<p>

It's a cold October night a long way from their last night and he is angry.

He rolls over and shakes and trembles and cusses but the bed is empty and cold and he misses her. She is home, he knows, but not with him. She is in the room next door, probably kneeling at the feet of Their Lord, that beautiful insane smile on her face and her long fingertips connected as she looked upon their master with an admiration so missed out on Rodolphus. He hears it, the whispers, the slithers, the flap of her cloak against the floor and hates her and her stupid seductive schemes. He bites his lip so hard that it bleeds.

She comes back an hour later, face flushed with delight and he wonders if the Dark Lord had finally swooped to the low level to meddle with his wife and then the comforting sheets are being drawn back and she is wrapping her cold hand around his ankle.

"Rodolphus," she says and he opens his eyes and looks at her and the resolution he has made to himself a second ago is useless; she overpowers everything about him.

She keeps his arms pinned to his side, preventing him from finding any pleasure for himself and he weeps with shame into the pillow against the side of her cold face after she cries out "Master!" to her release.

Rodolphus's illusion is over; it was always _him_ she loved.

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><p>Her hands are cold the last time he touches them.<p>

It's the night before the battle, the night when the Death Eaters all assemble in a circle in the drawing room of Malfoy Manor and he takes his rightful place by his wife. She hardly notices, so caught up in the plans and orders left to her by Their Lord, so anxious to please _him_, that she jerks when he places his fingers lightly on her wrist.

It's a single second with his fingers wrapped over her pulse point and her head half-turned so his nose is buried in the dark curls he fell in love with back when he was fifteen, and then it's over, broken by the orders delivered to them by Their Lord. Broken again by the third person in their marriage.

Rodolphus has no guilt now for resenting him.

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><p>Her lips are cold the last time he kisses her.<p>

She lies on the marble floor of the Hall where he had first fallen in love with her, and he, having fled the Ministry authorities rounding up Death Eaters, had snuck to her side where she lay abandoned in the mass of the dead.

Nobody sees the heavy-set man with thinning straw hair approach the pale insane witch lying on the floor with her mouth half-open and her eyes glassy staring at the see-through roof. Nobody sees him when he drops on his knees and presses a fiery hot hand to her icy cold forehead, stroking the black curls away from the face that he had fallen in love with on the day of his last OWL exam. Nobody sees him when the tears rolled down his cheeks and he whispers her name with a tenderness she would have hated and bends to press his bloody lips against her lifeless ones, the ones that had frozen on what might have been the last syllable of the Killing Curse.

It's not much of a comparison between the kisses in the earlier days of their marriage when he was full of fiery, passionate admiration of his young beautiful wife and she hadn't been so bold as to express her disgust of him so readily. He presses his lips hard to hers and hers are parted just slightly, irresponsive under his kiss, cold and hard.

He pulls back, and finds that he's left a trail of blood on her lips when he draws back to look at her again. He thinks she looks a wild creature of a woman, her eyes wide open, her mouth open in a half-laugh, half-scream, her curls wild and frizzy and her stone-like lips coloured crimson from his bloody kiss. He couldn't have fallen for anything short of someone like her.

Rodolphus almost doesn't care when the Ministry officials drag him off in chains to be interrogated, after discovering that a Death Eater had appeared from under his weakened and fluttering Disillusionment charm.

His love is long lost and it has hit him today, hard, a punch that he can never quite recover from.

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><p><em>Kindly review and I will love you.<em>


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